A Long Island man who was sucked into an MRI machine by a neck chain he was wearing has died, Nassau County police said.
Keith McAllister, 61, was wearing a 20-pound weight-training chain with a large lock around his neck when he walked into the room where his wife, Adrienne Jones-McAllister, was undergoing a knee scan on Wednesday. Realizing she would need help getting up afterward, she had called out for her husband and asked the technician to fetch him from the waiting area, she told News 12 Long Island after the incident.
The technician allowed McAllister into the room with the chain, Jones-McAllister said, noting that her husband had worn the chain to Nassau Open MRI in Westbury before, and that he and the tech had conversed about it in the past.
As McAllister approached, however, “the machine switched him around, pulled him in, and he hit the MRI,” Jones-McAllister told News 12. “I said, ‘Could you turn off the machine, call 911, do something, turn this damn thing off!’ ”
Both she and the technician struggled to separate her husband and the machine, but could not.
“He waved goodbye to me, and then his whole body went limp,” McAllister’s distraught widow told News 12.
He was attached to the machine for nearly an hour, Jones-McCallister’s daughter said in an online funding appeal for funeral expenses.
Nassau Open MRI in Westbury. (Google)
The Nassau County Police Department said the chain caused him “to be drawn into the machine, which resulted in a medical episode.”
McAllister was rushed to a local hospital in critical condition, where he was pronounced dead at 2:36 p.m. Thursday, Nassau County police said in an update on Friday. McAllister-Jones said her husband suffered several heart attacks after the incident.
Magnetic resonance imaging machines produce detailed internal body images that help detect and diagnose disease and monitor treatment, according to the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, using magnets powerful enough “to fling a wheelchair across the room.” Patients must remove all metal and electrical objects before undergoing a scan. McAllister’s stepdaughter said he had had permission to enter the room, but the technician had forgotten to remind him to take off the chain.
Anything made of iron, some types of steel, and other potentially magnetizable materials “would act like a torpedo trying to get into the middle of the center of the magnet,” director of imaging services Charles Winterfeldt told CBS News. Such instances are exceedingly rare, experts said.
With News Wire Services
Originally Published: July 20, 2025 at 5:33 PM EDT
